The present invention relates to techniques for reranking and increasing the relevance of the results of Internet searches, and more particularly, to techniques for increasing the relevance of Internet search results and reranking the results using a concept network.
With the advent of the Internet and the multitude of web pages and media content available to a user over the World Wide Web (web), a need has developed to provide users with streamlined approaches to filter and obtain desired information from the web. Search systems and processes have been developed to meet the needs of users to obtain desired information. Examples of such technologies can be accessed through Yahoo!, Google and other sites. Typically, a user inputs a query and a search process returns one or more search results (links) related to the query. The search results returned may be very related, or they may be completely unrelated, to what the user was actually looking for. The relatedness of search results to the query may be in part a function of the actual query entered as well as the robustness of the search system (underlying collection system) used.
Human beings do not naturally think in terms of queries. They are an artificial construct imposed on us, in part, by the need to query search engines or look up library catalogs. Human beings do not naturally think in terms of just single words either. What human beings think in terms of are natural concepts.
Search queries usually contain several words that define one or more concepts. Typically, some of the words in a search query are more relevant to defining the concepts than others. A search engine has no way of knowing which words in a search query are most relevant to the user's intent. As a result, search engines typically turn up many search results that are not relevant to the user's intent.
Search engines typically rank search results according to their relevance to the search query. Search queries often contain superfluous terms which cause the search engine to return irrelevant search results. Often the search engine ranks the irrelevant search results highly within the list of search results.
It would be desirable therefore to provide Internet searching techniques for increasing the relevance of the search results to the user's original intent.